At least five dead as town burns and 150,000 flee rag­ing in­fer­nos

than 20 mil­lion peo­ple were un­der red flag alerts last night – fac­ing a threat of “ex­treme fire be­haviour”. One blaze – Camp Fire, in Butte County, in the north of the state – had grown to 70,000 acres yes­ter­day. The five bod­ies in the Butte County town of Par­adise had been found in gut­ted ve­hi­cles in the same area of town.

Sher­iff-coro­ner Kory Honea said: “Due to the burn in­juries, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion could not be im­me­di­ately made.”

Par­adise res­i­dent Whit­ney Vaughn said that as peo­ple were driv­ing out of town many aban­doned their ve­hi­cles, “run­ning with ba­bies and kids”.

She added: “Some­one rammed our ve­hi­cle. There were no fire­fight­ers in sight and I am hop­ing all of these peo­ple made it out.”

Yes­ter­day wor­ried keep­ers at LA Zoo were begin­ning to evac­u­ate the an­i­mals.

Woolsey Fire, which is threat­en­ing Ven­tura and Los Angeles coun­ties, had grown to 12,000 acres by morn­ing.

The blaze is one of two burn­ing just miles from the site of Wed­nes­day night’s gun tragedy in Thou­sand Oaks.